Air Quality Sensors Systems as Tools to Support Guidance in Athletics Stadia for Elite and Recreational Athletes

Abstract

While athletes have high exposures to air pollutants due to their increased breathing rates, sport governing bodies have little guidance to support events scheduling or protect stadium users. A key limitation for this is the lack of hyper-local, high time-resolved air quality data representative of exposures in stadia. This work aimed to evaluate whether air quality sensors can describe ambient air quality in Athletics stadia. Sensing nodes were deployed in 6 stadia in major cities around the globe, monitoring NO2, O3, NO, PM10, PM2.5, PM1, CO, ambient temperature, and relative humidity. Results demonstrated that the interpretation of hourly pollutant patterns, in combination with self-organising maps (SOMs), enabled the interpretation of probable emission sources (e.g., vehicular traffic) and of atmospheric processes (e.g., local vs. regional O formation). The ratios between PM size fractions provided insights into potential emission sources (e.g., local dust re-suspension) which may help design mitigation strategies. The high resolution of the data facilitated identifying optimal periods of the day and year for scheduling athletic trainings and/or competitions. Provided that the necessary data quality checks are applied, sensors can support stadium operators in providing athlete communities with recommendations to minimise exposure and provide guidance for event scheduling.

Personal strategies to mitigate the effects of air pollution exposure during sport and exercise: a narrative review and position statement by the Canadian Academy of Sport and Exercise Medicine and the Canadian Society for Exercise Physiology

“…It must be acknowledged that most websites and indices generally rely on networks of fixed-site monitoring stations or remote sensing techniques that are designed to estimate population-wide exposures for regulatory purposes 54. While capable of providing accurate, long-term air quality data, monitoring stations have high construction costs and consequently are sparsely distributed and rarely situated near locations of interest in respect to exercise and sport.…”

“…In other words, the data may be nonspecific to an individual athlete’s environmental context and incapable of providing actionable, hyperlocal, time-resolved data. World Athletics has begun important work in this area, deploying air pollution sensors inside the main athletics stadia to provide local measurements 54 55. Alternatively, low-cost wearable air pollution sensors present a potentially promising method for determining exposure levels 56.…”